The Film Stage

After his revelatory coming-of-age film Genesis, Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage has expanded his canvas with Who by Fire, a lush, intimate, and psychologically riveting drama following two families on a secluded getaway in a remote cabin as they contend with...

A few years back, directors Lois Patiño and Matías Piñeiro joined forces for what was meant to be a very loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The resulting short, Sycorax, felt like the meeting of two kindred spirits. Piñeiro’s ability...

The degree of difficulty in making East of Wall must have been enormous: a small budget, a series of remote locations, a slew of non-actor performers, and the incredibly arduous task of working with horses. Written and directed by Kate...

Set years before George Michael’s arrest and inspired by the bathroom raids that provoked a moral panic in Mansfield, Ohio, in 1963, Carmen Emmi’s Syracuse-set thriller Plainclothes offers a unique twist on the coming-out genre. Cruising the food court and...

Offering a twist on the body-swap genre, Amanda Kramer’s Sundance Next entry By Design feels, at first glance, more suited to the stage or gallery than cinema. It’s a story about luxury, envy, and longing with a dry tone that...

An auteur-actor pairing to nearly match last week’s word of Johnnie To and Tony Leung comes via Variety, who tell us Ulrike Ottinger will direct Isabelle Huppert in The Blood Countess, a vampire feature based on the infamous Elizabeth Báthory...

It’s hard to say what’s more endearing about Takashi Miike these days: that the director of Audition and Ichi The Killer is still out there producing work at the same, alarming rate (his last release, a TV movie remake of...

With an evocative opening-credits sequence as the camera swirls through a virtual landscape of neon signs and lights, one might think they are witnessing the beginning of the next Gaspar Noé film. Thankfully what follows in Flora Lau’s second feature...

Evoking Gordon Park’s black-and-white photographs of the New Deal Era, cinematographer Brittany Shyne’s powerful debut feature Seeds offers a portrait of a disappearing way of life for Black farmers in the American South. Its casual approach mostly reflects rhythms of...

Early one morning, a single father and widower (John Magaro)––credited as Dad––wakes up his perceptive nine-year-old Ella (Molly Belle Wright) and mischievous six-year-old Charlie (Wyatt Solis) and asks them to pack a suitcase as quickly as they can. Everyone is...